I believe that having your own personal domain name is very important and to illustrate I will tell you a story that happened recently. I remember being at my dad’s home last summer and talking about my siblings. My brother Blade was fortunate to graduate from Pratt University and went on to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) to get a graduate’s degree in Fine Art. He is really good and is passionate about art and will be very successful. I happened to be at the computer and so I looked up his name as a dot com domain name. To my surprise it was available so I write him an email right away telling him he had better buy it or I would buy it and sell it to him, lol.

Needless to say he bought the domain name and I did the same to my sister who graduated from Dartmouth University. As a matter of fact my brother Blade will be having his first child with his beautiful wife Megan and I reminded him to make sure the domain name is available for their baby before naming him or her. That is kind of a joke but having your name as a dot com really is important these days. I have purchased the domain names for all the members of my family, it is a small investment ($10/year) to have the best possible real estate.

Now apart from having your own name as a dot com domain there are several reasons why you should have a personal domain name for blogs or any other promotional things you do online. I know a lot of people will get a Blogger, WordPress or some other kind of blog but ultimately they will control that domain name and if after years you have a lot of people that are visiting your site, which can mean a source of income, it can all disappear if that company is sold or goes out of business. A good domain name is like good real estate and in the past and still today some people make a lot of money selling domain names. The one that I will always remember is business dot com selling for over one million dollars.

Here are some more important reasons that you should own your own domain name for almost anything you may do online.

Professional – When you have your own domain name you have a much more professional image. For example instead of sending people to (www dot domainname dot com/robertdiaz) you can send them to www dot RobertDiaz dot com. Even in the case of Blogger or WordPress you can have your own domain name and simply forward it to your blog.

Memorable – Apart from being more professional it is also easier to remember allowing people to meet you, be told your domain name and they will be more apt to remember it. A domain name like www dot put your car on the pill dot com would be easier to remember than some long company name and your name tacked onto the end of it.

Length – Bigger is not always better. It is likely that if you choose your own domain name you will be able to keep the number of characters to a fewer number so it would fit better on a business card and other promotional marketing material you would use.

In addition to those key benefits you will have the opportunity to have an email address with your domain as part of it. This will look more professional than using a free email service like hotmail, msn, yahoo or gmail.

As an example your email address would be joe at joes business dot com instead of joesbusiness at hotmail dot com.

In conclusion I do hope you see the importance of having you own personal domain name. It looks more professional, it is easier to remember and can frequently be shorter than a company providing a domain name for you. In another article I will write about the details that should be considered in choosing a good domain name since they are not all created equally just like a house on the ocean versus a house in the desert.

BillWynne.com and the majority of my websites are registered with and hosted at www.Jojodomains.com